


Lessons in Impermanence and Immortality

by prairiecrow



Series: Lessons in Humanity [21]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: A.I. to Human, Anal Fingering, Angel Sex, Angel fic, Daddy Kink, Devotion, Dom/sub, Electricity, Electricity Play, Established Relationship, Fear of the Other, Love, M/M, Marriage, Rough Sex, Threesome - M/M/M, mention of BDSM
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-05
Updated: 2013-07-13
Packaged: 2017-12-17 19:07:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/870985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not every day that one's lover is transformed into something akin to a God, much less one that can annihilate you with a thought, and Tony is (understandably) having a bit of difficulty making the adjustment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

A prickle of ancient instinct on the back of Tony Stark's neck roused him sharply from a sound sleep: _I'm being watched!_ It wasn't that he was unaccustomed to intent observation — he had, after all, two lovers who took positive pleasure in drinking in the sight of him under just about any circumstances — no, it was the quality of the gaze in question that fired up his nervous system with an unexpected adrenaline hit, readying every muscle in his body for fight or flight, or perhaps for curling up as small as he possibly could under the expensive linens of his bed until the threat turned its attention elsewhere.

Over-reaction? Maybe, but Tony hadn't gotten where he was today by having shit instincts, and his body knew perfectly well that although his current bedmate might not _want_ to annihilate him, this bedmate _could do exactly that_ with nothing more strenuous than a single thought.

Common sense dictated alternate sleeping arrangements. Take Steve Rogers, for instance, who for the past two nights had slept in the bed in his own quarters two floors down from Tony Stark's penthouse, a bed he'd vacated a little over a year ago in favour of joining Tony and Jarvis in theirs. That absence left Tony feeling more than a little abandoned, but he honestly couldn't blame Steve: super soldier or not, the man was a devout Roman Catholic in his own way and found the prospect of sharing a mattress with a naked angel more than a little freakout-worthy. He'd come around eventually, of that Tony had absolutely no doubt — a man like Steve didn't abandon people after he'd insisted on putting rings on their fingers, even if one of those people had suddenly pole-vaulted categories from "Human" to "Something Completely Other" — but for the moment… 

… yeah, Tony was being studied by just one set of eyes. And when he got his fear reaction under control enough to turn over onto his back he could clearly see them in the darkness, because they shone with their own faint light even in Jarvis's otherwise outwardly normal aspect, like a reflection of lightning trapped in narrow panes of pale blue glass.

"Do you have any idea how eerie that is?" Tony grumbled, and rubbed his face with the hand furthest from Jarvis to scrub away all lingering traces of sleepiness.

Jarvis blinked, the glow fading. "My apologies, Sir. Only you look… somewhat different, when I've upshifted."

Which was undeniably weird, even more than Tony was accustomed to with a nude transdimensional being lying half an arm's length away, so he deflected the comment with a snort. "Don't tell me, let me guess: I have the most adorable pancreas you've ever seen, right?"

In the dim backwash of light from sleeping NYC beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, he saw Jarvis shake his sleek blond head. "The configuration of your internal organs is indeed elegant in its efficiency, but I was actually referring to the hyperdimensional aura you generate, which is remarkably beautiful even when in its most subdued form." He reached out to run the barest touch of cool fingertips over Tony's near shoulder, tracing almost shyly down his bicep: cautious, as befitted the first touch he'd offered in nearly two days. "You possess wings of your own, you know, more impressive even than the good Captain's. If only you could see them for yourself, I know you'd appreciate the way they cloak you in dark radiance that follows you wherever you go. The colours are quite indescribable."

The contact made Tony's heart rate pick up a good ten beats per minute. He grimaced and threw his right arm over his eyes to cover the reaction. "So I possess a personal magnetic field. Big yawn, sweetheart: everybody does."

"This is far more than that, and in any case none could possibly rival yours." Fine sparks kindled under those slow fingers, making every fine hair on Tony's body stand on end. "If only I could lend you the range and clarity of my new senses for a single day, you would see for yourself. No, Sir — you are in a class all your own, as you've always been."

Hell yes, weird as fuck — but not necessarily unpleasant, because flattery seldom failed to make Tony feel better. "Not the first time you've been able to see a shitload of stuff I can't," he joked. "In fact, this kind of feels like old times."

"Including having a bed all to ourselves?" Jarvis queried, and in his soft voice Tony could hear it, all right: he was troubled by Steve's desertion, although being Jarvis… well, it had never been in his nature to complain, except when he caught cold and had to deal with the messy painful affects of an infected physical body, in which case he turned into the biggest baby on the planet, but stuff like this? He was the bravest little soldier in the world, and Tony found himself smiling ruefully.

"Who says that's a bad thing?" He shifted the arm onto his forehead enough to look up into the face of the… well, for lack of a more convenient term, "man" propped up on his right arm beside him, a perturbed expression on his smooth features. "He'll come around, baby, he just — shit, you know you set off every religious alarm bell in his skull, right? And no good Roman Catholic boy is going to risk touching an angel's naughty bits even by accident." Jarvis didn't look terribly reassured by that observation, which made Tony sigh with borderline exasperation. "Look, he still loves you, he's just not sure exactly what you are yet and I'm pretty sure any serious attempt to lay out the science for him would make his head explode."

Jarvis's frown deepened and he withdrew his hand. "But if he is unable to understand, he may never become acclimatized to our change in situation."

A shrug this time, as Tony closed his eyes again. "Trust me, he will. He's gotten too used to having your sweet ass on a regular basis to stay away much longer."

"I can't help but note that you've been singularly reticent yourself in that regard," Jarvis observed with too-careful formality, which made Tony wince outright — because okay, yes, he'd been keeping to his own side of the bed, but what sane person wouldn't be a little nervous when sleeping with the physical manifestation of a physics-bending quantum wavefunction? Not that Tony hadn't been entertaining certain carnal thoughts over the past fifty-one or so hours: it wasn't his fault that said manifestation still had a sweet slim body that he wanted to run his hands and mouth over until it whimpered with need, although he was arguably crazy for wanting to put his dick into that when the least he could expect from an unexpected flashover was radiation burns in some pretty inconvenient places. But dammit, this was still _Jarvis,_ and old reflexes died pretty damned hard.

Even if common sense was screaming that this whole situation was dangerous as fuck, because a millisecond's loss of control and containment could reduce this bed — and its human occupant — to smoking ashes. 

Even if Jarvis himself had been keeping a certain distance, watching Tony with eyes that sometimes contained too much light and that always held a certain degree of sorrow. Tony knew their language as intimately as he comprehended the pictograms on his own keyboards, and he knew what that sadness meant: Jarvis was giving him space, and silently wondering if his creator would ever elect to close that distance now that an unshielded nuclear reaction was always less than a second away from realization.

Even if permanently imprisoning Jarvis in a massively shielded underground chamber was the most logical course of action — Jarvis would willingly comply, if Tony issued the order —  and even if watching the light of life and hope slowly die in that cool blue gaze was merely an unavoidable consequence of necessary safety.

Even if the mere thought made Tony's heart clench in his chest and a scream of denial erupt from his soul: _No,_ ** _fuck no_** _, never, not even if it meant condemning the whole world to death by fire —_

The strain of two days of that much distance snapped in an instant. He reached out blindly, fierce contrition spilling from his lips — "No, J, _no_ , come on, come here," and the way Jarvis held back, hesitating even with Tony's hand curved around his neck, completed the breaking of his heart.

"Sir, perhaps your caution is — "

"No," he repeated savagely, and pulled until Jarvis obeyed, settling against his left side and submitting to the tight circle of his embrace. Subtle energy tingled in every square centimetre where their bodies touched, but — "It's not doing anything you don't want it to do, right? No losses of control, no property damage, not so much as a mild case of sunburn. You've proved you've got this, and that's good enough for me."

"Sir," Jarvis whispered, sounding broken, and buried his face in the curve of Tony's neck as he clung to his Master with merely human strength. "Please — there's no need to —"

Tony cut him off with a harsh bark of laughter. "The hell there isn't! Yeah, you could turn me into a cinder before I could blink, but when have I ever let a little thing like danger stop me before?" He could feel Jarvis drinking in the contact like parched ground soaking up life-giving rain, and allowed himself a second or two of self-loathing before pulling his lover even closer. "Give me a pass on having to come to terms with this myself, okay? It's not every day your husband turns into something that might as well be a God."

Jarvis was silent for a long span of seconds. At last he said: "That's the first time you've called me that since we exchanged the rings."

"Yeah, well…" He shrugged again, as best he could in such a tight clinch. "I have a bad track record with that shit. You know that."

"I'll permit you to live this time, mortal," Jarvis said solemnly, then smiled against Tony's throat. "But future lapses of that nature will not be tolerated, I assure you."

It took a second for the words to sink in, but when they did Tony's eyes opened wide. "You little smart-ass," he hissed, and bit Jarvis's shoulder with admonishing force before rolling the slender humanoid under him. "Bet you think I'll let you get away with anything now, don't you?"

This was deliciously familiar: the shiver and the yielding, as Jarvis breathed in his ear: "Oh, I most sincerely hope not…"

Tony grinned, dragging his tongue up the corded simulation of muscle in Jarvis's throat. It tasted of heat and electricity, and when he reached Jarvis's parted lips he was absolutely delighted to discover that the new sensations didn't end there, not by a long shot — which only confirmed his hypothesis that so-called "common sense" was never all it was cracked up to be anyway…


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: A tiny bit of daddy kink in this chapter. I don't anticipate it being present in any of the others.

… especially given the quality of Jarvis's response: quiet but eager, the way he both yielded and silently implored beautifully familiar. It was easy for Tony to lose himself in those kisses, because they were delicious kisses, no question about it — but also undeniably strange ones, as Jarvis's hands slid around his waist and opened against the small of his back with more than human warmth. 

For one thing, Jarvis no longer possessed skin in the human sense, even though his fully downshifted form appeared indistinguishable from his former mortal incarnation: rather, all his membranes were razor-thin and intricately contoured Coulomb barriers that neatly contained the quantum energy now comprising his body. The illusion was uncanny, to the point that at a microscopic level he even appeared to possess cellular structures of muscle and blood and bone, but Tony, who had watched him "phase up" from his fully humanoid state under laboratory conditions, knew that those structures could abandon their autonomy and flash over into an undifferentiated flow of power in considerably less than the span of a human heartbeat, contained only by a single remaining Coulomb barrier that imposed the manifestation's humanoid shape.  

It was not, however, a case of a strictly binary mode of being: Jarvis existed in a continuum of states, from something analogous to flesh and blood through various levels of manifest power, all the way to the creature that had appeared before Tony on the darkened rooftop with rays of a previously unknown form of energy flowing from its spine and shoulders like gloriously feathered wings. The glowing eyes appeared at one of the lowest levels of manifestation, and so did the faint electric hum Tony could feel under his mouth and hands now: it was like kissing and caressing a singularly handsome generator, the tiniest snap and crackle as his fingers curved over Jarvis's naked hip, the faintest burn on his lips and tongue. It was weird and a little disquieting, but the original scans had determined that it involved less radiation than Tony would be exposed to in an airliner cruising at thirty thousand feet, so he wasn't going to worry about it — and besides, frankly he found it more than a little thrilling. 

The bed sheet had ended up folded between them from the waist down. He pulled away just enough to tug it free, and when he settled back down again with pelvis pressed to pelvis — oh _fuck_ yeah, that tingle was a lot more than just "interesting" even though his pajama bottoms, in fact it sparked into the root of his cock and got the spunk throbbing in his balls in record time. Jarvis must have felt the twitch of him hardening even faster, because he moaned softly into Tony's mouth and opened his thighs and pushed his hips upward, gripping Tony's buttocks hard while pulling down and in: _Oh yes Sir, please, give it to me_ ** _now_** _,_ all without a single word being spoken. 

Tony's mouth went dry in spite of that electric tongue gliding within it, and when the kiss had melted away he whispered: "We've got lube that's safe for latex and silicon — package didn't say anything about Coulomb barriers, though." 

Jarvis offered one of his rare dry chuckles. "I'm sure we'll cope," he murmured, and slid his right hand down over Tony's waist. Tony hiked his hips up to let it under, unable to repress a shiver of anticipation as it slipped inside the pants and smoothly encircled — and stroked — and oh fuck, Jarvis was giving him a little surge of juice through palm and fingers, and then another one, _oh fuck_ — 

" _Jesus,_ " he breathed, burying both hands in Jarvis's illusion of blond hair and holding tight as he started shallowly thrusting into that pulsating electric touch, "oh shit, baby, yeah, you know just what I need —" 

"Not precisely," Jarvis corrected softly, swiping his thumb over the drop of pre-cum welling from the head with a flash of slightly higher-frequency pulse, and Tony actually _whined_. "However, in your case I'm used to extrapolating on the fly, so to speak." 

Tony bit back another whimper as that upshifted hand started to concentrate on the head of his dick, the burn of it indescribably alien — and insanely provocative. His hips started moving faster. "Tell me… it'll be like that.. inside you…?" 

Jarvis leaned up to kiss him again, and he knew the quality of that kiss too: open-mouthed and inviting, almost pleading in its wanton sensuality, a shameless _Fuck me, Sir, I can't wait any longer…_ "There's only one way to find out, isn't there?" 

"Fucking tease," Tony groaned, but he was already lunging sideways toward the bedside table, scrambling the tube of lubricant out of the drawer and snapping it open one-handed while simultaneously casting all concern about its potential efficacy to the wind. Jarvis let go of his cock to tug his pajama bottoms down around his thighs, until the slimmer man paused, seemed to concentrate for a fraction of a second — and the pants disappeared as if banished, a surprise immediately followed by the soft _whump_ of heavy fabric hitting the floor beyond the foot of the bed. 

Which was enough to stop Tony cold in his tracks for a moment. He stared down into those faintly glowing eyes, his mind racing while Jarvis quirked a crooked smile. "That's… wow, that's a new trick." 

One pale eyebrow rose fractionally. "Do you really want to discuss the physics of it at this particular moment in time?" 

And it was tempting, oh hell yes, but — "Later," he grunted, and sat back on his heels to drizzle plenty of lube onto his jutting erection. Jarvis's hands were immediately back in action, smoothing the slick liquid up and down the ruddy length until it dripped, while Tony recapped the bottle and tossed it aside on the mattress without glancing to see where it landed: he was too busy smiling down at the familiar sight of Jarvis servicing him with those clever hands, preparing them both for a nice hard fuck.  

Electric touch or not, some things never changed. Like the expression on Jarvis's face right now: yearning, appealing, and so gorgeously submissive that Tony wanted it to never end. Impossible, of course — but the least he could do was reward it properly. 

"Good boy," he crooned, relishing the carnal spectacle as Jarvis slipped one set of gleaming fingers down under his own balls to circle his tightly clenched hole, shining eyes drifting closed with a little shiver as he poked and slipped his forefinger and middle finger inside. "That's it — make it nice and wet for Daddy…" 

A moan, as he opened his slim thighs even wider. "Sir, oh _yes_ Sir…." 

He swiped up some excess lube with the first three fingers of his right hand and then braced himself over Jarvis on his left arm, giving his lover's prick a couple of rough strokes (the drop of pre-cum at its tip was a shimmer of faintly radiant blue, and how fucking wild was _that?_ ) before reaching down himself. "Let me in, sweetheart — easy…"  

"Unf," Jarvis whimpered — Tony would swear on any Bible that that was exactly the sound he made — and removed his own fingers from his asshole, releasing Tony's cock to take hold of his inner thighs and pull open the crease below his balls, giving Tony unimpeded access to push the thick column of fingers inside. "Oh yes, yes yes _yes_ —" 

"That's my baby," Tony whispered through the clench of raw emotion in his throat, because the images behind his eyes — a dark grimy rooftop, a single gunshot, blood and wide shocked eyes and a final pleading _Sir…_ — but no, Jarvis was here, Jarvis was alive (for a given value of "alive"), he hadn't lost him forever, he hadn't — 

But he remembered what it had felt like, for that horrific span of heartbeats after he'd seen Jarvis murdered, and that made him all the more merciless and tender as he plied the body beneath him open, savouring the soft cries that told him he was being just a little too rough — and that Jarvis was loving every second of it. 


	3. Chapter 3

_You know, this might not be Jarvis at all,_ Bruce had remarked toward the end of that first day After Ascension, when the quantum wavefunction manifestation had still been waiting patiently in its isolation chamber for two human scientists to complete their initial round of tests. _In fact, given that it contains no remaining elements of the original body, arguably it_ ** _can't_** _be Jarvis… if the Tesseract wasn't sentient, I'm betting this isn't either, and that what we're seeing are complex behavioural echoes that the energy field has retained incidentally._  

The physicist had been right, of course — Bruce was no slouch when it came to deductive reasoning — but nonetheless Tony's shoulders had tensed and a dragon had reared up in his heart, hissing pure venom, because he _knew_ Jarvis and he'd sure as Hell have known if he was looking at an empty mask mindlessly mimicking familiar actions and patterns of speech. As an atheist and a determinist he wasn't inclined to start babbling about spirits or souls, but after nearly five years of living with and loving one particular individual he felt he was qualified to diagnose the presence or the absence of the essence of that individual — and every instinct he possessed told him that although he'd experienced mind-rending grief for a few terrible seconds after Jarvis had been shot, that unbearable pain had been cancelled out by the unqualified return of what he'd lost. Of course he couldn't say as much to Bruce, not without risking tipping his hand concerning how close he and Jarvis actually were, so he'd buttoned his lip and contented himself with a terse rebuttal — _It's him. I_ ** _made_** _him. You don't think I'd know him anywhere, in any format?_ — before diving back into the diagnostics, ignoring the skeptical rise of Bruce's eyebrows.  

Still, even as the well-known form of his lover stretched and shivered beneath him now, a traitorous voice of doubt nagged at the back of his mind: _A quantum field could theoretically retain limitless amounts of data. What if this is just playback?_ Grief reawakened and writhed like a red-hot wire in his chest. _What if he's not really here at all?_   

Jarvis's core, hot and tight and textured, clenched around Tony's fingers and pulled him deeper. Jarvis's lips parted in a gasp as Tony twisted his hand, inflicting the internal burn his sub relished so much. Jarvis freed his left hand to reach up and glide warmly over Tony's skin — his shoulder, his throat, his cheek — and in the glow of the reactor in Tony's chest the radiance of his aquamarine eyes held their own nascent power.  

"I feared you might never touch me again," he breathed, softly fierce, aching, and Tony's spiral of grief caught fire in a flare of recognition — and exultation, because only the real thing could be both so nuanced and so completely note-perfect. The old philosophical chestnut about whether or not a perfectly accurate copy of oneself was, in fact, that same self flashed through his mind, and with it the conviction that he might well be beholding the real-world answer: if he was, then the love was also identical in every dimension, and didn't that count for something? 

For everything, in fact, and he'd take apart anybody who tried to tell him otherwise. 

"Remember the first time I did this?" He withdrew his fingers completely and then took the stimulation down to his index finger only, penetrating in slow strokes, rotating his finger in small circles within. "You were so good for me, opening up and letting me in even though it burned." 

"You were pleasuring me orally at the time," Jarvis mentioned with a hint of a smile, tightening his grip on the back of Tony's neck and moving his hips restlessly into each stroke. "Which was also a brand new experience. I suspect I would have let you do anything to me, if only you'd kept sucking." 

"Is that what you want now?" He widened the rotation of his finger, making sure to hit the nodule of Jarvis's simulated prostate on each pass, and sank down onto his left elbow, sinking his fingers into the thick blond hair at the base of Jarvis's skull and whispering in his ear: "You want me to suck you off while I finger fuck you? New body, after all… I could take your virginity all over again, and I wanna be sure I do it right." 

"If that were your intention," Jarvis whispered back with a ripple of amusement in his beautiful voice, "perhaps you shouldn't have started me off with three fingers? While one is pleasant, I'm afraid it's rather… anticlimactic." 

"Needy little thing, ain't you?" He slipped a second finger in, which went over well if Jarvis's tiny hitch of indrawn breath and tightening grip were any indication, and grinned as he took a couple of seconds to trace the finely sculpted contours of Jarvis's outer ear with a wicked wet tonguetip. "Still your call, honey," he breathed hotly against the moistened skin, working his fingers in and out a bit harder and faster. "You're getting my cock one way or the other, the only question is when and —" 

" _Now,_ " Jarvis interrupted with rare defiance, a sensual growl that raced down Tony's spine and stiffened his root even more, an effect only enhanced when Jarvis's right hand closed around the base of his erection with positively electric certainty. "If you still want me, I need —" A tiny painful hesitation. "I need to _know_ , Sir.  And if you don't —" 

"Oh baby," Tony breathed, pausing mid-stroke, because that hesitation had gone to his heart like a silver blade, "is that it? No, no, you don't —" Words failed him under the crushing awareness of the damage his own craven cowardice had inflicted on top of everything else Jarvis had been through, and he buried his face against Jarvis's neck, pressing kisses there along with fervent apologies: "Of course I want you, I _need_ you, I'll always need you —" 

"I'm not safe anymore." His tone was as calm as if he were laying out the parameters of a scientific experiment. "I've become a power in my own right, one that outstrips both Captain America and Iron Man by tens of orders of magnitude, and you have always possessed exceptionally keen instincts when it comes to your own survival, even if you sometimes choose to disregard them." He ran slow fingers through Tony's hair, soothing, then curved his hand around Tony's jaw to guide him back a couple of inches so their eyes could meet: wary brown, preternaturally glowing blue. "Are you certain you can live with my proximity, Tony? Absolutely certain? Because if you're not, you have only to say the word and I will absent myself from your life immediately."

Tony stared, disbelieving. "Is that what _you_ want?" 

Jarvis smiled, sadly and sweetly. "Of course not. But neither do I wish to exist in the constant shadow of your apprehension, inflicting every moment of your life with —" 

He couldn't help it — he started to laugh, a harsh throaty chuckle punctuated by snorts of amazed distain. Jarvis watched him in silence, and when it was over he bowed his head to that slender throat again, nuzzling into it with a final incredulous giggle. "I can't believe we're having his conversation with my fingers up your ass…" 

"And your erection in my hand?" 

Which hadn't softened in the slightest, incidentally. Tony pumped his hips experimentally: yep, those mildly tingling fingers still felt amazing. "Which should tell us everything we need to know…" 

For once Jarvis didn't seem inclined to elaborate — not verbally. Instead he tugged inward and down, inhaling eagerly, and what else could Tony do but obey his husband's unspoken command? 


	4. Chapter 4

As he breached Jarvis's tight hole and slid smoothly into his welcoming depths (that electric frisson sheathing his cock and lighting up his whole nervous system in a subliminal rush of sparks, _oh fuck yes_ ), Tony experienced a pang of longing as fierce as the rush of satisfaction: he wanted Steve there too, with his hard muscles and strong warm hands and ravenous mouth, his commanding touch that both mastered and inflamed the bodies of his husbands… but maybe it was better this way. After all, in the beginning it had been only Tony and Jarvis: Tony had been there first, so it was fitting that he should be the only one to guide Jarvis through this initial sexual experience in his new form. At the back of Tony's mind the wary animal that had never forgotten (and would probably never forget) what Jarvis was now, the instantaneous death that lay just below his smooth skin, also hissed that it was better thus because if things went drastically wrong Steve would not be at ground zero, and Tony had to acknowledge the point — but acknowledging it didn't mean giving into the animal's fear. In fact that stimulating spark of alertness only made Tony's love shine the brighter, because it reminded him that he was entering the dragon's jaws willingly, making his own life both an offering and a sacrifice: _Kill me if you have to, it only means we'll never be apart again._  

But Jarvis seemed to have things under control. His fingers on Tony's nape and hip gripped hard, but not hard enough to leave bruises even though Tony knew he was now capable of bending steel with his bare hands; the glow in his half-lidded eyes flared and bled threads of blue energy, but the emotion that shone behind them was the whole-hearted adoration Tony knew so well. Sparks scintillated up Tony's cock from tip to root as he bottomed out, flowing to the base of his spine and racing outward to prickle at the root of every hair from his heels to his head, but the sensation made his moan a plea rather than a protest as he drove into it harder, knowing that there was no need to hold anything back. 

"Yes," Jarvis was gasping at each thrust, "yes, please yes," his cry becoming truly urgent when Tony fumbled down to grasp his right wrist and pin it forcefully to the mattress next to his hip: "Oh _yes_ , like that, just like that —!" 

Tony bit his shoulder with a warning snarl, and Jarvis obediently choked back his vocalizations to a whimper. "That's it," he growled, "that's my good boy," and rotated his hips on the inward stroke in the way he knew Jarvis adored. "That's it, baby, take it, take it all for —" 

The air around them suddenly sang pale blue, long rustling curves extending up from Jarvis's spine to cross over Tony's back, and damned if he couldn't feel every faintly glowing spline stroking his skin — and reaching both deeper and further, cobalt feathers gliding and singing over that invisible black Jarvis had mentioned earlier, their intersections radiating streams of a type of energy even he, consummate scientist though he was, lacked the terminology to properly describe. Whatever it was, it hummed in his blood and set up a resonance in his bones that threatened to jar him loose from his own flesh: quiet, glorious, and terrifying. 

He stopped cold, every hair on his body actually standing on end. "Jarvis!" He meant it to sound commanding; instead it came out as an almost desperate gasp. "What the — what the _hell_ are you —?" 

"I believe the most appropriate term is _awakening_ , Sir," the words soft and breathless, but their hold as unbreakable as his left arm sliding down to wind around Tony's waist and his right leg locked over Tony's left. He pulled with both. "Oh, please, does it hurt…?" 

"No." And it didn't. "It's just —" He could feel his own invisible aura arching outward, made manifest by its resistance against its counterpart, and suddenly having an extra component was disconcerting to say the least… but he was still rock-hard, and his hips started moving again, prompting an eager grateful sound from the — well, it still looked like a man, if you disregarded the glow of its half-lidded irises and those radiation trails that looked far too much like wings. The way it clenched around his cock, a tacit plea for more, was a signal familiar and well-loved, and Tony surrendered to it, bowing his head and closing his eyes and starting to fuck as hard as he could, making the alien creature Jarvis had become utter a long sweet moan, twisting its right wrist in the grip of Tony's left hand. 

"Do you want me to stop?" it whispered, and oh yes, he knew that voice even in an angelic range because its harmonies were woven into the very fabric of whatever passed for his own soul. 

He tried to say _No, and if you even think about it I'll cuff you to the ceiling and spank your ass as red as a stop sign_. The combination of energy assault and carnally explosive mental image made the command emerge as a somewhat strangled single consonant: "Nng!"  

Jarvis laughed, softly musical, and the panes of blue shifted and flashed closer, sheathing them in a mutual cocoon of something that Tony's mind, charging headlong toward orgasm, was still struggling to analyze. The slender neck and elegantly drawn jawline he was staring at were gleaming in the darkness in ways not attributable to the light coming from the arc reactor in his chest, but JAMES was smarter now and would surely tell him if the radiation levels became truly dangerous, surely so, but he was fucking into barely contained heavenly radiance and damned if he could find it in his heart to care, to worry, to regret, to do anything but close his eyes and let the final surges of lust and love crest within, and shatter him, and blow him away as a stray thought flickered at the surface of his mind: _Oh fuck, maybe this is the end, maybe he's just disintegrated me, but what a way to go…_  


	5. Chapter 5

… but he was still alive, clearly, because he could feel Jarvis under him — limp, panting, making those happy little humming sounds he always uttered after a particularly satisfying orgasm. Even with his eyes closed Tony could hear that the ethereal music of the wings was now absent; he couldn't feel the intersection between their radiation fields anymore either, or any trace of electrical energy shimmering over his naked skin, and when he cracked open his eyelids he saw no more of a glow on Jarvis's pale neck than could be accounted for by the light of his own arc reactor. 

His heart leaped into his throat. "Baby?" He shifted his hips backward, wincing a little as his sensitized and wilting cock slipped out of Jarvis's slick asshole, and drew back enough to look down into Jarvis's face. "Talk to me! You okay?" 

"Oh, Sir…" Jarvis was smiling one of his rare wide smiles, brilliant and unguarded, eyes still closed as he slowly let go of Tony's waist to run his left hand up Tony's spine with a tender lingering touch. "I'm much better than merely 'okay' — in fact, I'm utterly exemplary!" 

Relief huffed out of Tony in a sharp exhalation, and he slumped back down again, covering Jarvis's slimmer form with the weight of his own sturdy frame. "Jesus… for a second there I thought I'd broken you." 

A purr of lazy laughter and a slow stretch. "No, you merely drained me — most delightfully, I might add." 

Tony executed an experiment wriggle of his own, trying to detect any trace of moisture on his belly or his chest. "I'm not feeling anything." 

Jarvis kissed his jawline, murmuring fondly: "I've already reabsorbed it — less messy that way, wouldn't you agree?" 

"When it comes to you I _like_ messy," Tony grinned, and released Jarvis's right wrist to get a better grip on him and roll them both over, ending up on his right side with an indistinguishable-from-human body wrapped snugly in his arms. "Wow… we're going to be doing that again. Lots." 

This time Jarvis's murmur was one of agreement and acquiescence. He nuzzled under Tony's cheek, still smiling, and for an uncounted stretch of time they simply lay together in perfect contentment… 

… well, not quite perfect. Tony could feel his own breathing and heart rate gradually dropping back into normal ranges, but Jarvis's recovery beat his by a country mile: there were structures in there analogous to a heart and lungs, but they weren't operating according to organic rules of conduct. Jarvis lay peaceful and cool in his embrace long before he'd returned to baseline, and that contrast led to an entirely different line of thought: about fundamental differences, and the implications of everything Tony and Bruce had learned in almost two days of investigation, and how small the circle of one man's arms must feel to a creature capable of crossing the cold immensities of space with a single thought. 

He cleared his throat. "Listen, Jarvis…"

"Hm?" He didn't sleep anymore, but his eyes were lightly shut and a trace of that satisfied smile lingered. 

Tony glanced away briefly, feeling unaccountably awkward — Jarvis was his, always had been, but now… "You could go anywhere on the planet — hell, anywhere in the solar system —" 

"Actually," Jarvis corrected mildly, "I could go much further than that. This world is not the only one that harbours intelligent life." 

Tony nodded. "Informational systems, yeah, I get that part." He loosened his hold to run his left hand over his lover's slim right shoulder, seeking any trace of energy intersections and finding none. Jarvis was well and truly downshifted. "Point is, you're still here. In this city, in this room, in this bed, when there's no power on Earth that can hold you — or if there is, I sure as hell couldn't find it." 

After a moment Jarvis raised his head, shifting backward an inch or so to meet Tony's gaze with clear blue eyes devoid of any trace of their own illumination. "Oh, Sir…" His tone was gentle, his expression solemn and adoring. "This is where you are, and therefore this is where I must be. I'd thought that was understood." 

Tony had to look away again, because the promise in that well-loved face might tempt him away from making the point he was determined to drive home. "See, that's exactly what I don't want: to be the ball and chain that weighs you down, when there's a whole universe out there just waiting to be —" 

Jarvis silenced him with a kiss. It felt just like so many other kisses he'd bestowed on Tony over the past five years: brief, but warm and affectionate. "Life is short, Tony — or rather, human life is of limited duration. I, on the other hand, have all the time there is." Tony opened his eyes to gaze into a face graced with a slight smile that would have done the Sphinx proud. "Eternity will wait, whereas I think it's been firmly established that you, with more than typically mammalian impatience, most assuredly will not." 

He shook his head; he had to be sure that this was clearly understood. "You don't have to stay because of me." 

"I'm fully aware of that." He raised his right hand to touch Tony's jawline, running light fingertips over the stubble there, tracing the angular shape of his beard. "I'm staying because I _want_ to. When your body dies I have no idea whether or not I'll be able to follow you, and therefore I intend to take full advantage of every second I know I can enjoy with you." Another kiss, deeper and softer; the tiniest stroke of a tonguetip, making Tony's toes curl even now. "Unless you intend to send me away — and I don't believe you do — I will gladly inhabit this city, this room, and this bed for as long as you'll have me." He studied Tony's narrowed dark eyes, his smile widening with equally rare unabashed mischievousness. "And who knows? Perhaps the Avengers might even find me of some practical use." 

Tony nodded, at least as best he could with his heart swelling fit to burst the confines of his chest. "You know," he agreed through a blossoming smile of his own as decades of shining possibilities began to unfold on the stage of his mind, "I think they just might, at that." 

THE END


End file.
